A communication management strategy for increasing the academic and vocational potential of the functionally disabled, non-verbal post-secondary adult.

The current study was undertaken to evaluate the expressive communicative effectiveness of a physically handicapped student registered with the Office of Disabled Student Services at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in a variety of communicative circumstances. The primary purpose of the investigation was to determine the comparative effectiveness/efficiency of verbal communication as produced naturally by the subject versus that produced via a personal computer and voice synthesizer. Two additional components of the communicative exchange, the degree of familiarity of the communication partner with the subject and the nature of the utterance, were examined in relation to communicative effectiveness/efficiency as measured in terms of mean transmission times. Results indicated that transmission time was not reduced when using the augmentative communication system utilized for this investigation, but was, in fact, significantly increased. The degree of familiarity of the communication partner and the nature of the utterance had no significant effect upon time required for message transmission, Discussion of several extraneous and confounding variables is included to clarify the significance of these findings.